The Cocktail Nation

Cigars. Steaks. Cocktails. This jazzy trio of former American
favorites came roaring back in the 1990s, transformed from social
vices into hallmarks of sophistication-especially for men. Driven
by media coverage that has promoted as much as reported these
trends, the renewed fads have been packaged together into a
supposed redefinition of American's attitude toward health-damaging
behavior.

Across the country, writers have described the rise of "The
Cocktail Nation," a supposedly massive subculture of bon vivants
living a devil-may-care existence. Their background music: aged
crooners Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra, who several years back
became suddenly popular among young people. Supposedly, this
signaled a desire to return to the carefree American epoch of the
singers' original heydays. Spread by the 1996 movie Swingers, this
vision of besuited guys who are "so money" chasing "beautiful
babies" has hatched cigar bars and cocktail lounges on every
mall-style hipster strip in America.

Drawing on this anecdotal evidence, trend writers proclaim that
Americans have tired of cholesterol counts and sober living. We are
ready to enjoy life again, damn it, and pay the consequences later.
It's a wonderful, seductive story line, one that has yielded some
of the most overblown journalistic prose in decades. And the
numbers seem to back it up. Cigar sales have skyrocketed. Hip bars
compete to invent new cocktails. Steakhouses are doing great
business.

But if you take a harder, closer look at what's going on, the
trend spotters have got it wrong. In fact, studies reveal that,
whatever their occasional indulgences, Americans are more obsessed
with their mortality than ever. Rather than going gung-ho into the
good night, we're terrified. Cocktail Nation? More like Nation of
Wimps.

The New Martini is all glamour, its sleek image distilled from
old movie clips and Algonquin Roundtable witticisms. It intoxicates
with memories of tycoons and tough guys, starlets and vamps on
ocean liners and in speakeasies. -St. Petersburg Times, April
1997

For those of us whose adulthood has been marked by downsizing
and round-the-clock productivity, the three-martini lunch seems
like a mass delusion, something possible only in an economy so
strong it could roll along every afternoon on auto-pilot. Today,
people who have anything stronger than a single glass of wine at a
business lunch get odd looks from their tablemates.

Having spent years as the Chicago Tribune's "Dr. Nightlife,"
Rick Kogan remembers the days of the serious drinkers. He mocks
today's new breed of cocktail connoisseurs, who make a show of
ordering complicated, recently invented drinks like the
Cosmopolitan and Chocolate Martini. "In the old days, no one talked
about, 'sipping martinis'," Kogan says. "They just said, 'Let's get
a drink.'"

When you look at the actual trends in America-the kind supported
by numbers, not buckets of printer's ink-they punch a hole in the
"cocktail nation" concept large enough to drive through several
truckloads of goat-cheese-stuffed olives. Studies by the Alcohol
Research Group in Berkeley, California, show the number of people
who say they did not drink in the past 12 months rose from 30.6
percent in 1984 to 35.4 percent in 1995. Over the same period, the
number of people who report having five or more drinks a day at
least once a week has also dropped, from 6.1 percent to 4.5
percent.

Furthermore, heavy drinkers are far more likely to be chugging
than sipping. "Evidence has repeatedly shown that the heaviest
consumption is in beer," says the center's Thomas Greenfield. "So
many people may actually be drinking less by converting to
cocktails. Beer accounts for 67 percent of all alcohol consumed in
America, (as measured by the actual ethanol content of beverages
consumed), according to a new study by the center. Hard liquor,
which serves as the basis for any cocktail, accounts for only
one-fifth of the alcohol we drink. Ten percent of American drinkers
consume 57 percent of all our alcohol intake, and beer accounts for
75 percent of their imbibing.

"The alcohol industry likes to promote the idea of people
saying, 'To hell with all this neo-temperance,'" Greenfield says.
"But actually, we've found there are two brands of abstainers:
those who always abstain and those who occasionally let loose,
reconnect to their glory days and regret it afterward."

Grad student Carrie Yury, a 27-year-old who has bartended in New
York City and Chicago, echoes Greenfield's take. Among her
customers, she distinguishes between the older cocktail set-who
drink the same martini repeatedly, several times a week-and the new
generation of cocktail types, who experiment more, order only off
preset martini lists, and drink less.

Yury says her own evolution as a drinker reflects what she
observes in young customers. "In the old days, when I drank all the
time, I drank a lot more beer," she says. "Now, my relationship to
liquor is a lot more Epicurean than alcoholic. When I drink at all,
I want something special."

This is the 999999s, as in 'dressed to,' and most people
are....After a 35-year dormancy, the Lounge is open again. Vamps in
cocktail dresses and mugs in fedoras are slinking inside to pour
their souls into the highball glasses that hold their hearts....But
Lounge is so much more than a mixed drink, retro music, and a fine
cigar. -Esquire, April 1997

As anyone who has tried to kick smoking knows all too well,
there is more than a hangover to falling off the nicotine wagon.
Among America's most visible anti-smoking activists, former Surgeon
General C. Everett Koop once compared quitting cigarettes to
beating heroine addiction, saying nicotine junkies had it harder.
Yet as the ill effects of smoking, and even second-hand smoke, have
been better and better documented, the percentage of cigarette
smokers in America has dropped precipitously.

In the 1960s, more than half of American men smoked, according
to the National Center for Health Statistics. By 1990, the share
had dropped to 28 percent, and has plateaued around that level ever
since. Among women, the drop is less steep. In 1965, one-third of
all women smoked, compared with 23 percent in 1994.

For groups like the American Lung Association (ALA), that trend
marks a significant victory. Not surprisingly, the ALA has been
horrified by the recent surge in cigar smoking. Anti-tobacco types
have tried to counteract the stogie's surge by mounting campaigns
that point to the increased chances of mouth cancers associated
with lighting up.

The case is hardly helped by the widespread view that cigar
smoking is a "safer" alternative to cigarettes, because cigar
smokers do not inhale the way cigarette smokers do. In theory, this
allows the same relaxation without the long-term damage.
Shorter-term effects count, as well, says PR maven Tom Doody of
Chicago, who quit cigarettes but now smokes an occasional cigar. As
head of a firm that does a huge business promoting nightclubs and
restaurants, Doody has watched the cigar trend up close. "A lot of
the former smokers I know quit because they felt cigarettes were
affecting their performance-at the gym, in bed, running to the
train every morning," he says. "As for the new health campaigns
trying to make cigar smoking look just as dangerous, I've never
seen such completely irresponsible rhetoric."

Celebrities seem to confirm this view. Paragons of health such
as Chicago Bulls demigod Michael Jordan and actor Arnold
Schwarzenegger-who once chaired the Presidential Commission on
Physical Fitness-regularly pop up on national TV and magazine
covers smoking celebratory cigars.

In an odd example of unrelated fads compounding each other,
hip-hop culture also played a role in popularizing cigars. This is
especially true for the Phillies Blunt, a brand prized for the
sweet taste it gives when half-emptied and re-packed with cannabis.
The cigar's popularity in trend-setting hip-hop circles is probably
one reason teen cigar-smoking has increased dramatically. In 1996,
an estimated 27 percent of teens aged 14 to 19 reported smoking a
cigar in the past year, according to a study conducted by the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Here are other examples of the cigar's growing popularity: often
disdained for their pungent, room-clearing aroma, cigars are now
even having perfumes named after them. The circulation of Cigar
Aficionado magazine rose from 141,000 in 1994 to nearly 400,000 in
1996. Most major American cities now have several cigar clubs,
havens where upscale smokers keep private humidors stocked and
entertain business partners. Between 1993 to 1997, reported a
recent National Cancer Institute study, the number of U.S. cigar
smokers rose by nearly 50 percent.

The biggest growth area? Precisely those titanic cigars that pop
up most in movie-star mouths. Consumption of large cigars increased
66 percent between 1993 and 1997, to an estimated 3.55 billion,
according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). What we're
seeing is the wholesale reversal of a nearly three-decade trend.
Sales of premium cigars, generally imported from the Caribbean,
spiked an estimated 154 percent between 1993 and 1996, probably
thanks to upper-income smokers who have strongly embraced the
trend. The increase followed almost three decades of annual
declines in the consumption of large cigars.

"Smoking a cigar makes you look successful," explains Chicago
painter Dzine, 27, who says he first acquired a taste for cigars
three years ago while visiting Miami. The availability of "Cubans"
makes the town a stogie-lover's mecca. "I started smoking cigars
instead of cigarettes, because I felt like it did much less damage
to my health."

There's a long historical precedent for this attitude. U.S.
cigar sales rose steadily for about a decade after the Surgeon
General first warned that cigarettes damaged the health of
smokers.

The popularity of Chicago's steakhouses may have ebbed and
flowed over the years, but the best of them have always been packed
with hungry carnivores. The current resurgence has been touched off
by two related trends. First would be the Rat Pack factor, whereby
the present touchstone for all things hip seems to be Las Vegas
1961. What better way to progress from that icy-cold see-through to
that long roll of Cuban leaf than with a steak big and bloody
enough to do Frank proud? -NewCity alternative weekly, April
1998

Nothing symbolizes traditional American cuisine quite like a
juicy steak, richly marbled with fat and served beside a heaping
mass of mashed potatoes. Unfortunately for cattlemen, many
Americans see that very platter as a one-way ticket toward
angioplasty. Open most magazines that offer health tips and you'll
inevitably come across the suggestion to cut back on beef,
substituting lighter meats such as chicken and fish in its
place.

Many people seem to be following that dietary injunction.
Overall per-capita meat consumptionincreased 9 percent between 1970
and 1995, to 192.5 pounds, according to the USDA. But the types of
meat we eat are changing. Poultry consumption almost doubled over
the period, to 62.9 pounds per person in 1995. Red meat declined by
almost 13 percent, but Americans still eat plenty of it, at 114.7
pounds per person. Echoing those data, a 1997 Wirthlin Worldwide
poll showed that more than half of U.S. men and almost
three-fourths of women say they eat less red meat than two years
before.

Don't go to steakhouses, however, to try confirming this trend.
The National Cattlemen's Beef Association, which tracks red meat's
popularity using an independent NET/NPD-Crest survey, boasts that
the number of steakhouse patrons increased 43 percent between 1993
and 1997, when measured over a two-week period. Spending in casual
steakhouses almost doubled over the period, to $2.3 million in
1997.

The implication seems clear: steak is becoming a restaurant
treat, rather than an at-home staple. "People might be cutting back
at home, but when they go out they say, 'I'm gonna splurge,'" says
Donnie Madia, who owns with a partner the hot-spot Blackbird
restaurant in Chicago. "Frankly, I've been a little surprised. But
people like their red meat; they want that eight-ounce fillet."

THE TRUTH BEHIND THE TREND In searching for an explanation of
Americans' renewed taste for the finer forms of indulgence, you can
start by deep-sixing any notion of an anti-health backlash. In the
same 1997 Wirthlin Report cited above, adults indicated the
following recent changes in their eating habits: 68 percent buy
more "light" or low-fat foods; 68 percent read nutritional labels
before buying food; 65 percent watch their cholesterol intake more
closely; 65 percent eat fast food less often.

Trying to reconcile the "cocktail nation" trend with our
almost-obsessive concern over health, it's instructive to think
about St. Patrick's Day-ironically enough, a generally beery
holiday. In most American cities, parades march for hours,
Kelly-green sweaters keep revelers warm, and affected brogues boom
through the air. Want a tamer St. Patrick's Day? Go to Dublin. In
Ireland the occasion draws only a fraction of its stateside
fanfare.

Sociologists have a name for this phenomenon: "Symbolic
ethnicity." Your average Irish American, for example, is less
likely than his parents to live among other Irish Americans, know
any Irish, or have visited Ireland. To compensate for the loss of
the deeper ethnic connections, the theory goes, such rapidly
assimilating Americans redouble their efforts on ethnic
holidays.

In much the same way, the cocktail nation may well represent a
sort of symbolic hedonism. Having quit smoking, people smoke an
occasional cigar. After regularly choosing salads over fast food,
diners reward themselves with a Porterhouse steak every now and
then. And even the alcohol industry has made a mantra of the
"drinking less, drinking better" concept. Much as we may miss the
everyday highs that come from previous bad habits, the 1990s'
productivity-paced lifestyle makes them difficult to sustain. But
when the pressure lifts momentarily, we make the most of it.

Still, there's some truth to the idea that Americans have
rebelled against a completely spartan lifestyle. Brad Fay of Roper
Starch Worldwide calls current attitudes toward indulging "cool
fusion," a process in which Americans meld together seemingly
contradictory habits to achieve a more emotionally balanced,
enjoyable lifestyle. "We see this in many aspects of American
life," he says. "Think of the Victorian-style house, complete with
a wraparound porch, but also wired for new technologies. Or the
mixing of business travel with vacation time, something people
never used to do. Or people taking more work home, but also
conducting more personal business at the office. It's an end to
either/or, black-and-white thinking."

Viewed from a "cool fusion" standpoint, Fay says, the mixing of
healthy living with cocktail-sipping or cigar smoking makes perfect
sense. "People are taking better care of themselves overall, but
making exceptions to go all out on a special occasion or to reward
themselves," he says. "And many doctors would probably agree that
it's not so bad to indulge yourself once in a while, because what
really counts is the day-to-day."

Ice Clinks. Dino's on the hi-fi. Every news organ in the western
hemisphere has already run your story. 'Lounge Culture,' as the
name suggests, never really goes anywhere. One day a federal death
squad will hunt down and eliminate every loser with thick-rimmed
glasses and a smoking jacket. Until then, however, there will be
articles by overeager J-school trend spotters announcing the
Cocktail Renaissance. -Spy, July/August 1997

Clearly, the numbers show that there is a market for the
resurgent cocktail-steak-cigar troika. But what was once a way of
life has been fetishized into a ritual, with trend journalists
beating the drum. "This cocktail trend isn't a new lifestyle," says
Rick Kogan, aka Dr. Nightlife. "It's more like people putting on
their dad's old clothes for a night. I hate to blast the media, but
every time you open a martini bar within five blocks of a
newspaper, a trend is born." Granted, some of those martini bars
will do quite well, especially the ones that really work the retro
angle. (If it has not hit your town already, expect a return of
swing dancing.)

But do not bank on the end of American health-consciousness.
Because if anything seems clear, it is that the trend spotters read
way too much into the Cocktail Nation's emergence, misjudging the
underlying attitudes at play. What we've seen is just an
appropriation of certain elements from the 1950s halcyon nightlife,
not its wholesale return.

To Chicago's Doody, who has made his living off nightlife for
two decades, what we're seeing is an evolution toward a more mature
market, one that values sophistication over getting obliterated.
"This is a whole new phenomenon, with nightlife going more toward a
French-style appreciation of finer products," he says. "And that
wasn't there in the Rat Pack heyday, when people were drinking
Cutty Sark-and-soda and puffing nickel cigars."

Now, he says, the emphasis has turned toward more ritualistic
settings, like the cigar room or cafe. There, the emphasis is on
catching just enough of a buzz to get conversation flowing, but no
more. As Madia's partner at the Blackbird restaurant, liquor
connoisseur Ricky Diarmit puts it, "The 1950s were a beautiful time
to be living, with guys rolling down the road in convertibles
drinking martinis. Now, people aren't throwing everything to the
wind the same way. There are more restraints. We'll never see those
Sinatra and Dean Martin days again."

Taking It Further The Alcohol Research Group conducts the
National Alcohol Survey. It can be reached at 2000 Hearst Avenue,
Berkeley, CA 94709; telephone (510) 642-5208. The American Lung
Association tracks data on cigarette and cigar smoking. Contact the
organization at 1740 Broadway, New York, NY 10019-4374; telephone
(212) 315-8622. The National Cancer Institute recently released a
comprehensive report on cigar smoking. Cigars: Health Effects and
Trends is a 200-page monograph, available on the institute's Web
site at http://www.nci.nih.gov/. The U.S. Department of
Agriculture's Economic Research Service maintains and updates data
on tobacco use. See its tobacco briefing page at
http://www.econ.ag.gov/Briefing/tobacco/. Wirthlin Worldwide
conducts regular surveys on many topics. For more information on
its June 1997 survey on nutrition attitudes, contact the company at
1363 Beverly Road, McLean, VA 22101; telephone (703) 556-0001. Data
on per-capita food consumption are compiled annually by the USDA
Economic Research Service. They are available on its Web site at
htttp://www.econ.ag.gov. Roper Starch Worldwide, Inc., conducts a
monthly survey of U.S. adults on many topics. For more information,
contact the company at 205 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017;
telephone (212) 599-0700.

Just when it seemed that every last American had gotten the
message that healthy habits make for healthy lives, steakhouses are
hot, cocktail lounges are sprouting up everywhere, and true
celebrity is conferred to medium-profile entertainers and unknown
moguls by cover stories in Cigar Aficionado magazine. Consumers are
flocking to products and places that are carefully positioned by
entrepreneurs with a sharp eye for what's cool. "People are sick of
the lifestyle police telling us what we can do," says Cathleen
Burke, vice president and director of marketing for Kobrand
Corporation, a wine merchant in New York City with one of the
nation's fastest-growing distilled-spirits products in its
portfolio.

Indeed, consumers are shelling out good money for indulgences
that come with government warnings or draw the wrath of volunteer
health organizations. For example, even as the volume of spirits
consumption declined 0.5 percent from 1996 to 1997, according to
industry watcher Adams Liquor Handbook, sales revenue was up 2.2
percent to $34.1 billion. "High-end products, such as cognac,
single-malt Scotch, imported gin and vodka, and super-premium
brands across all categories had increased sales," the trade
publication reported, along with an annual list of the
fastest-growing beer, wine, and liquor brands for the one-year
period.

Here are three stories of businesses bucking the decades-long
gospel that says watch your cholesterol, be careful about alcohol,
and always shun tobacco.

PORTERHOUSE, MEDIUM RARE Filet mignon and prime rib move quickly
at Lone Star Steakhouse & Saloon, Inc. of Wichita, Kansas,
where attire is strictly casual. With checks averaging $18 per
person, Lone Star, like a host of other chain steakhouses, is
attracting patrons from a wide swath of the market.

Although 80 percent of entrees sold are steak dinners, the menu
shares the spotlight with a cultivated Texas roadhouse atmosphere.
Country & Western music plays in the background, and the wait
staff breaks out in an occasional line dance on Friday nights in
Colonie, New York, an Albany suburb far from the Lone Star State in
every way.

The concept has worked so well that the company has grown from a
single location in 1989 to 268 Lone Star Steakhouses in the U.S.
and 38 abroad. In addition, development plans call for nearly 20
new restaurants in 1998. The chain only recently opened its first
restaurant on the West Coast, in Los Angeles.

But even with the huge West Coast market unserved by the chain,
almost 4 percent of adults surveyed in 1997 by Mediamark Research
said they had dined at a Lone Star in the previous six months.
Reflecting its accessibility to families with kids, Lone Star's
patronage is spread fairly evenly among a range of ages: 12 percent
aged 18 to 24; 22 percent aged 25 to 34, 27 percent aged 35 to 44;
22 percent aged 45 to 54; and 13 percent aged 55 to 64. Lone Star
cultivates a middle-market image, but many of its clients are
upscale-32 percent have household incomes of more than $75,000.

The company has its eyes on much more than the family market. It
is rolling out two new higher-end steakhouse formats, taking aim
with one at the downtown business entertainment market. Five
Sullivan's Steakhouse restaurants, featuring certified Angus beef
and live jazz most nights of the week, were open for business in
April 1998, and six to eight more were on the drawing board. Checks
average $50 per person at Sullivan's. Three Del Frisco's Double
Eagle Steak Houses, with checks averaging $60, were open, and three
or four more are in the works. One will be in the McGraw-Hill
Building at Sixth Avenue and 49th Street in Manhattan.

"Our most direct competitor will be Morton's of Chicago," says
John White, chief financial officer for Lone Star Steakhouse &
Saloon, adding that beef never lost as much favor in restaurants as
it did at home. In fact, he says, Lone Star capitalized on an
opportunity created by Ponderosa, Sizzler, and downscale
steakhouses that began to de-emphasize steak a decade ago.

BOMBAY MARTINI WITH TWO OLIVES Look for the bright gold and red
bottles of Alize at the next backyard barbecue you go to this
summer.They may be there if you're in the company of trendy women
aged 21 to 35. Although 70 percent of its sales are through liquor
stores, the cognac and passion fruit juice mix is also selling to
women who enjoy their nights out at retro-chic cocktail lounges,
says Burke, the marketing director at Kobrand.

And sell it does. Kobrand moved 475,000 cases of Alize last
year, according to Adams Liquor Handbook. That is dwarfed by
Absolut vodka's 3.4 million cases or Jack Daniel's 3.1 million
cases. But those longer-established brands can't touch Alize's
growth. Sales in 1997 were up almost 19 percent from the previous
year. The brand was discovered in France by a Kobrand executive 12
years ago, and it's posted annual compound growth of 80 percent
since 1993. Burke says she expects at least several more years of
double-digit increases. Sales are strongest in big cities, she
says, but are coming from all corners of the country and across the
racial and ethnic spectrum. Alize 's appeal drops off for women
older than age 35, primarily because they are less likely than
younger women to go out to bars and to keep up with fashionable
concoctions, she says.

Although Kobrand uses billboards and magazines like Cosmopolitan
and Glamour to advertise Alize, the drink really wins a following
when young women taste a sample at food events or in bars where the
distributor sponsors a tango-dancing couple clad in Alize colors.
"Nobody has been able to duplicate what we have in the bottle,"
Burke says.

Yet it's not just the brand's taste that has it booming. Alize
has benefited from a resurgent interest in cocktails among hip,
young, urban dwellers who patronize nightclubs with neon martini
glasses in the windows and Tony Bennett records playing in the
background. Women especially, who often consume sweet mixed drinks,
are driving sales of several fast-growing tequilas, gins, and
vodkas, Burke says.

Alize has in its favor that it really isn't part of an
established liquor category, she says. It doesn't have to take
sales away from a direct competitor in order to succeed. The same
can be said for other fast-growing distilled spirits cited by Adams
Liquor Handbook. T.G.I. Friday's, a line of pre-mixed drinks made
by IDV North America, chalked up annual compound growth of 93.5
percent between 1993 and 1997, reaching total sales of 1.3 million
cases. Ice Box, another line of prepared cocktails, from White Rock
Distilleries, averaged 35.9 percent growth from 1994 to 1997,
reaching total sales of 140,000 cases.

But there are fast-growing players in traditional categories,
too. Paul Masson Grande Amber Brandy has posted 27.9 percent growth
from 1996 to 1997. It moved 619,000 cases last year. Skyy Vodka
grew 18.8 percent over the same period, with sales hitting 594,000
cases last year.

MACANUDO AND A LIGHT The Federal Grill & Cigar Bar in
Allentown, Pennsylvania, tapped into a rich vein of interest when
it opened in the summer of 1997. Never mind that cigars had been
scorned by previous generations, or that Allentown is an
historically blue-collar community, where upscale smokes and booze
might be less popular than straightforward American favorites.

"We have a lot of weekend smokers who are not necessarily
committed cigar smokers, but are doing it because it's fun," says
owner Iris Konia. The weekenders pick from a list, complete with
descriptions about each of the premium brands kept in stock. "Then
we have people who are serious cigar smokers. They're the ones who
come in with their own cigar cases, their cutters and their
lighters. They're very knowledgeable about cigars."

With a full dinner menu, an assortment of single-malt scotches,
sipping tequilas, small-batch bourbons, 14 microbrews on draft, and
a list of 40 different martinis, Konia says, "We feature all the
indulgences."

Not all patrons light up. But cigars are an important part of
the atmosphere at Federal Grill. So far, it's an atmosphere that
appears to have appeal. Konia says she serves as many as 250
dinners in her 64-seat dining room on Friday and Saturday nights,
and typically100 to 125 dinners on weekday nights. Federal Grill's
customers are largely business owners, doctors, lawyers and other
professionals, Konia says. Men and women alike patronize the
establishment, with the majority between their late 20s and 50s.
"They're sophisticated," she says. "They've been around. They've
tried different foods and different wines."

While their numbers will never rival more mainstream
establishments, like family-style steakhouses, such dens of
decadent pleasure have burgeoned well beyond big cities. Even more
common are cigar nights at restaurants, bars, and clubs. Cigar
Aficionado lists 600 establishments hosting regular cigar
nights.

Perhaps with places like Federal Grill in mind, or perhaps
reflecting readership that draws advertisers like Cartier, Jaguar,
and Tiffany, Cigar Aficionado editor and publisher Marvin R.
Shanken wrote in a recent issue, "As a cigar lover, you have
witnessed one of the most extraordinary cultural and business
phenomena of the past 50 years. It's been incredible to see cigars
transformed from their pariah status in the United States to
something that is associated with the good life."

Konia doesn't expect the good life to go out of style any time
soon in Allentown. "People are coming to realize that doing things
they enjoy in moderation is probably more healthful than this
constant state of denial," she says.-by Bill Stoneman